tion of fantastical, than of real ideas. Our most complex ideas and notions which combine in the greatest variety, modes and relations, as well as simple ideas, are often copies; they are often referred to existences, to particular existences, as to their originals: and when they are not so, when they are put together in the mind, as the mind never perceived them put together in existence, though this may be said to be done "by the free choice of the mind, and without considering any connection they have in nature," yet are they not, when they are real, quite arbitrary, nor quite void of reference to existence. Mr. Locke shall prove this for me. He says, that one of the ways by which we get these complex ideas of mixed modes is experience and observation of things themselves. In all these instances, then, the complex idea is derived from existence, and is a copy first, though it becomes an archetype afterwards. It is so in the example he brings, in that of seeing two men wrestle. It is so in a multitude of others, in all those that are real and of real use. Murder is as old as the human race, and theft as property. Shall we believe that men were lawgivers and moralists, before they were spectators of the actions of one another? Invention is another of the ways he mentions, in which, by a voluntary act of the mind, several simple ideas are put together in it, and the archetype precedes existence. But even in these cases, the combinations of ideas ascribed to the invention of the mind, are suggested to it by other combinations, as it would be easy to show in the example brought of printing: and though the mind cannot be said to copy, when it has no particular existence in view, yet must it be allowed to imitate, when it has in view not only its simple ideas, but divers combinations of them, derived immediately or remotely from what exists or has existed in the system of nature: and these it has in view always when the complex ideas and notions we frame are not purely fantastical. Those of parricide and sacrilege were framed perhaps by some men, for they were not by all, before either of these crimes had been committed; and so they might, without doing much honor to the boasted power of knowing a priori and independently of existence. The relation of father and son is added to the complex idea of murder in one: and as soon as one order of men and their property came to be reputed sacred, it required no superior intelligence to foresee that they might be robbed as well as other men. But the mathematician never saw a circle mathematically true, such as he describes, and whose properties he considers: neither did Tully ever see such an image of virtue as he proposes, and whose principles and effects are explained in his offices. Be it so. But the mathematician, who considers the properties of a circle, a square, or a rectangle, had observed the various terminations of exten

sion before he turned mathematican, and the moralist had obseved, wherein the good and evil of society consists, and had framed, on what he observed, ideas and notions concerning virtue and vice, and the perfection of human nature before he wrote of ethics. The ideas and notions of both, to be productive of real knowledge, must be derived from existence, and referred back again to it.

According to Mr. Locke, our knowledge "concerning these ideas is real, and reaches things themselves; because we intend things no farther, than as they are conformable to our ideas." These ideas then, to be real, must reach things themselves; that is, they must be rightly abstracted from things that exist, and they must be applied to things, no farther than things are conformable to them. This now coincides enough with the opinion I advance. Our ideas are fantastic, and our knowledge imaginary, when the former are framed without a sufficient conformity to existence, and when they are applied to things to which they are not applicable; for as ideas and notions may be void of all reality in themselves, so may they become fantastical by a fantastical application.

The mistake about these complex ideas carries much resemblance to that which Mr. Locke exposes so justly about maxims or axioms. These have been reputed the principles of science, whereas they are in truth the result of it, when they are evident; and cannot pass therefore with any propriety for the præcognita and præconcessa, for which they have been vended in the schools. Just so the complex ideas we speak of are called archetypes; and men infatuate one another enough to imagine that there is a superior intellectual region, as it were, a region of ideas that are the principles of general scientifical knowledge, from whence particular knowledge is to be deduced, and by which it is to be controlled. Whereas in truth all our ideas and notions are fantastical, as all our maxims are false, when they are not founded in particular knowledge: when they are carried further than evidence, the criterion of truth, accompanies them; and above all, when they are repugnant, as philosophical and theological ideas and notions frequently are, to this very evidence and to our knowledge of things as they exist.

Something has been said concerning ideas and notions in a former part of this essay, that may seem to render what is here said about such as are fantastical the less necessary. But having occasion to speak of these, I choose rather to run the risk of repetition (usefully I hope to the great end of fixing the bounds of real knowledge) than not to bring into a fuller view this intellectual artifice, which has served to build up so much imaginary knowledge, at the expense of neglecting the other, and of

corrupting it in all its parts. It was by the means of fantastical ideas and notions that chemistry was turned into alchymy; astronomy into judicial astrology; physics, by which I understand the contemplation of mind as well as body, into theurgic and natural magic; and the religion of nature into various systems of plain, but almost blasphemous, doctrines of absurd mysteries and superstitious rites. All these effects proceeded from the vain philosophy of men more intent to imagine what may be, than to observe what is: and if we add to these such as have proceeded from fantastical notions of abstraction, upon which the tedious and impertinent subtilties of ontology are founded, we shall have before us very nearly the sum of all that learned error into which men have fallen by reasoning on fantastical ideas and notions in search of real: as if it was below the majesty of the human mind to seek for reality and truth out of itself: and as if our senses were given us only to excite our intellect, and not to inform it by experiment and observation.

The principal occasions, on which the mind exercises the artifice spoken of in framing ideas that are fantastical, may be reduced to these three. Philosophers invent hypothetical ideas and notions in order to erect on them such systems as cannot be erected on real ideas and notions, that is on ideas and notions that have a known foundation in nature. They treat of ideas and notions that are incomplete and inadequate, as if they were complete and adequate. They dogmatise on obscure and confused ideas and notions, as if they were clear and distinct. Let us produce in this essay one example at least of the first. Your patience and mine too may be worn out by that time: and the examples omitted now may be taken up at some other.

SECTION VIII.

I might have reckoned hypotheses among those arts of the mind that degenerate into artifice; for such they have been often. The greatest part of ancient philosophy, almost all except ethics, was nothing else: and to mention no other among the moderns, Des Cartes had much to answer for of this kind. His great reputation put hypotheses into fashion; and natural philosophy became a sort of physical romance. But this manner of imposing imaginary for real knowledge is over, whilst one more absurd remains in credit; and, whilst naturalists can slide no longer from art into artifice without being detected, metaphysicians set out in artifice, and they succeed. A hypothesis in physics can make its way now no faster nor no further than experience countenances and supports it. But in metaphysics it is otherwise.

Their hypotheses stand alone: they stand in the place of experimental knowledge, are not so much as deduced from it by a fair analogy, but are made independently of, and frequently in direct contradiction to it.

They who plead for hypotheses urge, not very unreasonably, that they may be of some use in the investigation of truth, whilst they are employed; and that they may serve to the same purpose, even when they are discovered to be false and are laid aside: as men who have missed their way give some instruction to others to find it. Besides which they do not so much as pretend that any hypothesis ought to be maintained, if a single phenomenon stands in direct opposition to it. I do not agree to this plea in the whole, but to the latter part of it entirely. By that, the criterion of hypotheses is established by the favorers of them: we take it as they give it; and this criterion in the physical world is real actual existence. The Copernican system, itself, stands on no other bottom. The Newtonian system of attraction stands on the same: and this bottom is grown so broad and so firm, that neither the jokes of foreign wits, nor the cavils of foreign philosophers, can shake it as far as sensible bodies and sensible distances are concerned. But at the same time they who presume to suppose it equally certain where insensible bodies, the minima naturæ, and insensible distances, are concerned, as some of our countrymen have done, presume too much; this application of it not having been yet enough confirmed: and they have been accordingly justly censured for raising too hastily a hypothesis into a system. With such precautions and under such restrictions, hypotheses can do no hurt, nor serve to propagate error. But then it is surely a ridiculous scene to observe how confidently some metaphysical philosophers, who show themselves extremely scrupulous about such hypotheses as I have mentioned, either admit on the authority of others, or publish on their own, not barely as hypotheses but as demonstrations, the wildest notions imaginable; notions that are founded on nothing known. nor knowable, and that can be tried, therefore, by no criterion whatever.

I have spoken of physics and metaphysics sometimes in the usual style; but I am far from altering the opinion I have already owned, and cannot, therefore, acquiesce to the pretensions of those who, under the umbrage of a supposed science that considers general natures, essences, being in the abstract, and spirit or immaterial substance, would place themselves in a rank of philosophical precedence above those who consider corporeal nature in the several phenomena, and would control, what they neglect, particular experimental knowledge. As to the ontosophists, they are the lineal descendants of the schoolmen; and they deal like

their progenitors in little else than hard words and such abstract ideas and notions, as render our knowledge neither more distinct nor more extensive, but serve to perplex it and to envelope in their obscurity what is in itself very plain. I shall neglect them, therefore, as the rest even of the learned world appears to do. The example I am to produce, under this head of hypothetical ideas and notions, shall be taken from those philosophers who usurp and appropriate to themselves, as if it were their peculiar province, the doctrine of spirits and spiritual things; whereas pneumatics taken in this sense, if they are any thing, are as truly objects of physics, as pneumatics, taken in a more proper sense, for that branch of natural philosophy whose object is the air we breathe. This distinction, however, has been established; and by the help of it, whilst naturalists are not at liberty to make hypotheses that are not founded in some degree of experimental knowledge, and that are not liable to be controled by it in all their parts and in all their progress, metaphysicians are left at liberty to frame as many fantastical systems as they please on ideas and notions purely hypothetical, without any regard to this foundation, or this control, as we observed just now.

As soon as men began to reflect on their own nature, and on that of all the bodies which surrounded them, they could not fail to observe solidity, extension, figure, divisibility, and mobility, the most apparent properties of the body or matter. As little could they fail to observe the operations of their own minds, in which they had the perceptions of these ideas, and to frame ideas of thought, and of the several modes of thinking, particularly of that which has the power of beginning motion. None of these ideas were contained in their ideas of body, nor necessarily connected with them: and that of a power to begin motion, which they observed to be in the whole animal kind, and which they knew consciously to be the effect of thought, must strike them as a superior property to that of mobility, with which they had occasion to compare it every instant. Taking it for granted, then, that they knew, as soon as they began to philosophise, all the perceivable properties of matter, they concluded, that such things as could not be accounted for by these, were to be accounted for by the properties of some unperceivable or unperceived matter, or else by the properties of some other substance. The first assumption was that of the most ancient philosophers: the other was made much later, at least it was much later that extended and non-extended substance were plainly contradistinguished.

Thus the distinction of body and soul came to be made and established among almost all the philosophers. It would be tedious even to run over the confused notions that were entertained about